a descriptive framework of workspace awareness...

Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness –1– Gutwin and Greenberg

A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware

Carl Gutwin

Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan

57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, Canada, S7N 5A9

[email protected]

Saul Greenberg

Department of Computer Science University of Calgary

2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Canada, T2N 1N4

[email protected]

Abstract Supporting awareness of others is an idea that holds promise for improving the usability of real-time distributed groupware. However, there is little principled information available about awareness that can be used by groupware designers. In this article, we develop a descriptive theory of awareness for the purpose of aiding groupware design, focusing on one kind of group awareness called workspace awareness. We focus on how small groups perform generation and execution tasks in medium-sized shared workspaces—tasks where group members frequently shift between individual and shared activities during the work session. We have built a three-part framework that examines the concept of workspace awareness and that helps designers understand the concept for purposes of designing awareness support in groupware. The framework sets out elements of knowledge that make up workspace awareness, perceptual mechanisms used to maintain awareness, and the ways that people use workspace awareness in collaboration. The framework also organizes previous research on awareness and extends it to provide designers with a vocabulary and a set of ground rules for analysing work situations, for comparing awareness devices, and for explaining evaluation results. The basic structure of the theory can be used to describe other kinds of awareness that are important to the usability of groupware.

Keywords Awareness, groupware design, groupware usability, real-time distributed groupware, situation awareness, shared workspaces, workspace awareness

Cite as: Gutwin, C., and Greenberg, S. (2001) A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Kluwer Academic Press.

Copyright for this article is held by Kluwer. See http://www.wkap.nl/journalhome.htm/ for journal subscription information.


Introduction

Awareness has recently begun to receive considerable attention in CSCW and groupware

research (e.g. Dourish and Bellotti, 1992; McDaniel and Brinck 1997; Rodden 1996;

Gutwin and Greenberg 1998a). While staying aware of others is something we take for

granted in the everyday world, maintaining this awareness has proven difficult in real-time

distributed systems where information resources are poor and interaction mechanisms are

foreign. As a result, working together through a groupware system often seems inefficient

and clumsy compared with face-to-face work. It is becoming more and more apparent that

being able to stay aware of others plays an important role in the fluidity and naturalness of

collaboration, and supporting awareness of others is looked on as one way of reducing the

characteristic awkwardness of remote collaboration. Awareness is a design concept that

holds promise for significantly improving the usability of real-time distributed groupware.

Despite this attention, no clear overall picture of awareness has yet emerged from the

CSCW community. With a few exceptions, awareness support presented to date involves

localized solutions to specific domain problems, and isolated approaches and principles that

are difficult to generalize to other situations. Most importantly, this void means that

groupware designers have little principled information available to them about how to

support awareness in other domains and new systems. Faced with a blank slate for each

new application, designers must reinvent awareness from their own experience of what it is,

how it works, and how it is used in the task at hand.

Our goal in this article is to develop a descriptive theory of awareness for the purpose of

aiding groupware design. We synthesize and organize existing research on awareness, and

extend this work through a conceptual framework. Our motivation is the observation that

current groupware systems are not particularly usable—and here we are more concerned

with how well a system supports activities of collaboration like communication,

coordination, and assistance, than we are with how well the system supports the domain

task (Salas 1995). Our overall research hypothesis is that helping people to stay aware in

groupware workspaces will improve a groupware system’s usability.


Our conceptual framework differs from previous work on groupware awareness in three

ways:

• it integrates and expands upon a variety of observations and previous theories of

awareness;

• it addresses a particular type of situation—small groups working over medium sized

shared workspaces; and

• it is intended to assist the iterative design of real-time distributed groupware.

We examine one kind of awareness in collaboration—called workspace awareness because

of its intimate relationship with shared workspaces—and construct a framework that

describes the concept for use in groupware design. Workspace awareness is the up-to-the-

moment understanding of another person’s interaction with a shared workspace (Gutwin

and Greenberg 1996). Workspace awareness (WA) involves knowledge about where others

are working, what others are doing, and what they are going to do next. This information is

useful for many of the activities of collaboration—for coordinating action, managing

coupling, talking about the task, anticipating others’ actions, and finding opportunities to

assist one another.

Starting from recent human factors research on awareness and from Neisser’s (1976)

cognitive model of how awareness is maintained, our WA framework is organized around

three issues:

• what kinds of information people keep track of in shared workspaces;

• how people gather workspace awareness information; and

• how people use workspace awareness information in collaboration.

These three areas inform three problems faced by groupware designers setting out to

support awareness: what information to gather and distribute, how to present the

information to the group, and when the information will be most useful. The framework

provides designers with a structure to organize thinking about awareness support, a

vocabulary for analysing collaborative activity and for comparing solutions, and a set of

starting points for more specific design work. We do not give prescriptive rules and

guidelines, however, since each groupware application will have to operate within


particular awareness requirements dictated by the task and the group situation. The

framework was developed iteratively over several years (e.g. see Gutwin and Greenberg

1996; Gutwin, Greenberg, and Roseman 1996, Gutwin and Greenberg 1998a) and is

derived from a variety of sources:

• observations and insights of other groupware developers on issues concerning

awareness (e.g. Stefik et al. 1987a; Tang 1991; Beaudouin-Lafon and Karsenty 1992;

Dourish and Bellotti 1992; Dix et al 1993);

• theories developed by psychologists, linguists, ethnographers and human factors

researchers on awareness (e.g., Clark 1996, Brennan 1990, Heath & Luff 1995; Endsley

1995);

• our own observational studies of face to face groups performing tasks over shared work

surfaces (see Appendix A);

• our own iterative development and testing of many awareness widgets and displays,

where we analyzed reasons for success and failure (e.g. Gutwin and Greenberg 1996b,

1998a).

In this article, we explore workspace awareness and detail the three parts of the conceptual

framework. To begin, we outline the concepts that underlie and bound the research, such as

real-time distributed groupware, shared workspaces, and workspace awareness. Next, we

give more detail on why awareness is a problem in groupware, and on the difficulty of

supporting workspace awareness in a distributed computational setting. Third, we discuss

human factors research into what awareness is and how it works, research that underlies the

conceptual framework. We then introduce the three-part framework itself.

2. Setting the scene

There are bounds on the collaborative situations that we consider in this research. Our

boundaries involve the kinds of groups we are trying to support, the workspace

environment where collaboration takes place, the kinds of tasks that groups will undertake,

and the kinds of groupware that will be used.


Systems: real-time distributed groupware. Real-time distributed groupware systems

allow people to work or play together at the same time, but from different places (e.g. Ellis

et al. 1991). Although many kinds of group activity can be supported with real-time

distributed groupware, we are particularly interested in applications that provide a shared

workspace.

Environment: shared workspaces. Many real-time groupware systems provide a bounded

space where people can see and manipulate artifacts related to their activities. We

concentrate on flat, medium-sized surfaces upon which objects can be placed and

manipulated, and around which a small group of people can collaborate. In these spaces,

the focus of the activity is on the visible and manipulable objects through which the task is

carried out. The combination of physical space and artifacts makes a shared workspace an

external representation of the joint activity (Clark, 1996; Norman, 1993; Hutchins, 1990).

Tasks: generation and execution. Primary task types in shared workspaces are generation

and execution activities (McGrath 1984). In particular, these tasks tend to involve creation

of new artifacts, navigation through a space of objects, or performance of physical

manipulation on existing artifacts. Examples include activities such as construction (page

layout, diagram assembly), organization (arranging, ordering, or sorting artifacts), design

(drawing, generating an outline), or exploration (finding certain types of artifacts in the

space). Other types of tasks (e.g. decision-making) also involve workspace awareness, but

as these types involve less interaction with the artifacts, we do not consider them as primary

for the framework.

Groups: small groups and mixed-focus collaboration. Small groups of between two and

five people primarily carry out tasks in these medium-sized workspaces. These groups

often engage in mixed-focus collaboration, where people shift frequently between

individual and shared activities during a work session (e.g. Dourish and Bellotti, 1992;

Salvador et al., 1995). Although larger groups may also engage in tasks that require

workspace awareness, it is less common for large groups to work synchronously over a

shared workspace (because of space limitations), and we take small group activity as our

primary focus.


Within these boundaries, a rich variety of small-group collaboration is possible. For

example, typical examples might include two people organizing slides on a light table, a

research group generating ideas on a whiteboard, or the managers of a project planning a

task timeline. These and all the other group activities within our boundaries share a

common problem when they take place in a groupware setting: it is difficult to maintain

awareness of others in the workspace.

3. The awareness problem in groupware workspaces

In a face-to-face workspace, awareness of one another is relatively easy to maintain, and

the mechanics of collaboration are natural, spontaneous, and unforced. Unfortunately,

workspace awareness is much harder to maintain in groupware workspaces than in face-to-

face environments, and it is often difficult or impossible to determine who else is in the

workspace, where they are working, and what they are doing.

There are three main reasons why this is so. First, the input and output devices used in

groupware systems generate only a fraction of the perceptual information that is available

in a face-to-face workspace. Second, a user’s interaction with a computational workspace

generates much less information than actions in a physical workspace. Third, groupware

systems often do not present even the limited awareness information that is available to the

system.

As an example, consider a basic shared whiteboard such as the GroupSketchpad system

from the GroupKit toolkit (Roseman and Greenberg 1995), seen below in Figure 2. As each

person draws, their actions are communicated to the other machine, so both participants’

workspaces contain the same objects. At this moment in their task, the participants have

scrolled their viewports to different parts of the workspace, and only a portion of their

views overlap.


Figure 2. GroupSketchpad, a relaxed-WYSIWIS shared whiteboard

Systems like this one show almost none of the awareness information that would be

available to a group working with a physical whiteboard. People’s hands and bodies are

reduced to simple telepointers, there is no sound, and only a small piece of the entire

drawing can be seen at one time. In this situation, it will be difficult or impossible for the

two participants to discuss particular objects, provide timely assistance, monitor the other

person’s activities, or anticipate their actions. In short, lack of information about others

means that many of the little things that contribute to smooth and natural collaboration will

be missing from the interaction.

In relaxed-WYSIWIS systems like this one, the awareness problem is particularly severe.

When different people can scroll to different parts of the workspace (as in mixed-focus

collaboration), they still need to maintain awareness of others; however, any information

about where the other person is working or what they are doing can only be gathered

through verbal communication. Once a person loses track of their partner, collaborating

with them in real time becomes much more difficult.

How can groupware designers address the awareness problem? Part of the solution is to

provide people with more information about their collaborators. As it is infeasible to

replicate the detail and size of real-world workspaces, however, designers must carefully

determine what information is most important, and how it can be put to best advantage in

the system. The framework of workspace awareness is intended to provide designers with


assistance in making these decisions. The first step involves setting out more precisely what

workspace awareness is, and the process by which people manage to maintain it.

4. Awareness

In this section, we outline characteristics of awareness that are relevant to group work,

describe prior research in awareness, describe the concept of workspace awareness in more

detail, and set out a model of how awareness is maintained.

4.1. Characteristics of awareness

Previous researchers have defined awareness as knowledge created through interaction

between an agent and its environment—in simple terms, “knowing what is going on”

(Endsley 1995, p. 36). This conception of awareness involves states of knowledge as well

as dynamic processes of perception and action. Four basic characteristics run through prior

work on awareness (e.g. Adams et al 1995; Norman 1993; Endsley 1995).

1. Awareness is knowledge about the state of an environment bounded in time and space.

2. Environments change over time, so awareness is knowledge that must be maintained

and kept up to date.

3. People interact with and explore the environment, and the maintenance of awareness is

accomplished through this interaction.

4. Awareness is a secondary goal in the task—that is, the overall goal is not simply to

maintain awareness but to complete some task in the environment.

Everyone has experienced this kind of awareness; at its most basic, it is what allows us to

walk around without bumping into things. As situations and environments become more

complex, however, information demands sometimes outstrip our ability to attend, and

awareness becomes more noticeable. In these contexts, previous researchers have explored

what they call situation awareness, a concept that underlies the idea of workspace

awareness in groupware.


4.2. Situation awareness (SA)

Research into awareness as we describe it above originated in the study of military aviation,

where pilots interact with highly dynamic, information-rich environments. In recent years,

researchers have expanded their focus to other environments where situation awareness

plays a major role, such as commercial aviation (Sarter and Woods, 1995), air traffic

control (Smith and Hancock 1995), and anesthesiology (Gaba and Howard 1995). These

environments all share the characteristics of “dynamism, complexity, high information

load, variable workload, and risk” (Gaba and Howard 1995).

The human factors community has not settled on a single definition of situation awareness,

but most researchers include aspects of product (i.e. knowledge that an actor can make use

of), and process (i.e. how that knowledge is created through interaction with the

environment). A good general definition of SA is as “the up-to-the minute cognizance

required to operate or maintain a system” (Adams et al 1995, p.85). Endsley (1995) focuses

more on the process, proposing a three stage definition:

Level 1: perception of relevant elements of the environment. An actor must first be able to

gather perceptual information from the environment, and be able to selectively attend to

those elements that are most relevant for the task at hand.

Level 2: comprehension of those elements. An actor must be able to integrate the incoming

perceptual information with existing knowledge, and make sense of the information in light

of the current situation.

Level 3: prediction of the states of those elements in the near future. To perform well in a

situation, an actor must also be able to anticipate changes to the environment and be able to

predict how incoming information will change.

The characteristics of awareness as introduced above also apply to workspace awareness: it

is knowledge of a dynamic environment, it is maintained through perceptual information

gathered from the environment, and it is peripheral to the primary group activity. We view

workspace awareness as a specialization of situation awareness, one that is tied to the

specific setting of the shared workspace.


4.3. Workspace awareness

We define workspace awareness as the up-to-the-moment understanding of another

person’s interaction with the shared workspace. This definition bounds the concept in two

ways. First, workspace awareness is awareness of people and how they interact with the

workspace, rather than just awareness of the workspace itself. Second, workspace

awareness is limited to events happening in the workspace—inside the temporal and

physical bounds of the task that the group is carrying out. This means that workspace

awareness differs from informal awareness of who is around and available for

collaboration, and from awareness of cues and turns in verbal conversation, both of which

have been studied previously in CSCW (e.g. Borning and Travers 1991; Dourish and Bly

1992; Greenberg 1996) and in linguistics (e.g. Clark 1996; Goodwin 1981).

The shared workspace setting makes workspace awareness a specialized kind of situation

awareness. When someone works alone in a workspace, their activities and their SA

involve only the workspace and the domain task (see Figure 3). In a collaborative situation,

however, people must undertake another task, that of collaboration, and therefore their

situation awareness must involve both the domain and the collaboration.

Domain tasks Domain tasks Domain tasks

Collaboration task

Figure 3. Domain and collaboration tasks

A second apparent difference between workspace awareness and situation awareness is that

collaborating in most shared workspaces often does not involve high information load or


extreme dynamism1. That is, it is not generally difficult to maintain workspace awareness

in the real world: sorting slides on a table does not seem very similar to air combat in a jet

fighter. However, the two types of situations do share an important characteristic: people

are unable to gather the information they need from the environment. In the jet aircraft, the

information load exceeds the pilot’s ability to take it all in. In the slide-sorting task,

although the participants’ perception would normally be perfectly adequate, a groupware

system has artificially reduced their abilities to gather awareness information.

This means that the initial problems of maintaining WA in groupware revolve around

obtaining useful information, rather than around what people make of the information. In

the situations that SA research currently studies, problems can occur at any of Endsley’s

three levels: people can fail to gather important information from the environment, or they

may fail to understand what gathered information means to the activity, or they may fail to

predict what that information means for future events. In workspace situations, all of these

can also occur, but we must focus first on the lack of information at the first and second

levels. People’s perception is artificially hampered by the technological constraints of a

groupware system: information may be unavailable, or it may be presented in a form that

makes the information unusable for maintaining up-to-the-moment awareness. The

designer’s task and our conceptual framework concentrate on these two levels: on

determining what information to present, and on presenting that information so that people

can maintain awareness easily and naturally.

4.4. Maintaining awareness

Understanding how people maintain awareness is crucial if we are to design systems that

support workspace awareness. Adams et al (1995) suggest a cognitive model that shows

how awareness is maintained in dynamic environments, a model that also draws together

the process and product aspects of different definitions of SA. The model is Neisser’s

1 However, these qualities could easily be part of collaborative work: for example, in a fast-paced multiplayer

video game.


(1976) perception-action cycle, a “cognitive framework for the interdependence of

memory, perception, and action” (Adams et al 1995, p. 88). Neisser’s model, shown in

Figure 4, captures the interaction between the agent and the environment, and incorporates

relationships between a person’s knowledge and their information-gathering activity. It

differs from linear models of information processing by recognizing that perception is

influenced and directed by existing knowledge.

Environment

Knowledge Exploration

SamplesModifies

Directs

Figure 4. The perception-action cycle (Neisser 1976)

Awareness of an environment is created and sustained through the perception-action cycle.

When a person enters an environment to do a particular task, they bring with them a general

understanding of the situation and a basic idea of what to look for. The information that

they then pick up from the environment can be interpreted in light of existing knowledge to

help the person determine the current state of the environment—that is, what is

happening—and also help them to predict what will happen next. These expectations lead

to a further refinement in perceptual sensitivity, as when the expectation of seeing another

aircraft sensitizes a pilot to subtle variations in the visual field (Adams et al 1995, p. 89).

The perception-action cycle combines both product and process aspects of awareness.

Product is captured by the active knowledge created by previous cycles, and process is

captured by the movement around the cycle.


To summarize thus far, Neisser’s cycle and the research into situation awareness provide us

with a foundation for a conceptual framework of workspace awareness. We have

established that workspace awareness is a specialization of SA, where the ‘situation’ is

well-defined—others’ interactions with a shared workspace. Workspace awareness is

maintained through a perception-action cycle, in which awareness knowledge both directs

and is updated by perceptual exploration of the workspace environment. Finally, the initial

problem in maintaining workspace awareness in distributed settings is that groupware

technology limits what people can perceive of others in the workspace, hindering their

ability to gather WA information from the environment.

We now turn to the conceptual framework itself. Part one involves the types of information

that make up WA, Part two involves the mechanisms people use to gather WA information,

and Part three involves the ways that people use WA information in collaboration. The

contents of the framework come from existing research in CSCW, HCI, and human factors,

and from our own observations of simple tabletop tasks and of real world group work in

offices and control rooms2. After the three sections dealing with the framework, we discuss

ways in which the knowledge of the framework can be used in the design of interface

widgets and interaction techniques.

5. Framework Part one: What information makes up workspace awareness?

Workspace awareness is made up of many kinds of knowledge, and the first part of the

framework divides the concept into components. This part of the framework gives

designers a basic idea of what information to capture and distribute in a groupware system.

Even though a person can keep track of many things in a shared workspace, elements from

a basic set make repeated appearances in research literature (e.g. Dourish and Bellotti 1992;

Sohlenkamp and Chwelos 1994; McDaniel and Brinck 1997). The basic set is the elements

that answer “who, what, where, when, and how” questions. That is, when we work with

2 Appendix A briefly describes our own observational studies used in the conceptual framework.


others in a physical shared space, we know who we are working with, what they are doing,

where they are working, when various events happen, and how those events occur. People

keep track of these things in all kinds of collaborative work, and these are the kinds of

information that should be considered first by designers.

Within these basic categories, we have identified specific elements of knowledge that make

up the core of workspace awareness. Tables 1 and 2 show these elements and list the

questions that each element can answer. Table 1 contains those elements that relate to the

present, and Table 2 contains those that relate to the past. The elements are all

commonsense things that deal with interactions between a person and the environment.

Awareness of presence and identity is simply the knowledge that there are others in the

workspace and who they are, and authorship involves the mapping between an action and

the person carrying it out. Awareness of actions and intentions is the understanding of what

another person is doing, either in detail or at a general level. Awareness of artifact means

knowledge about what object a person is working on. Location, gaze, and view relate to

where the person is working, where they are looking, and what they can see. Awareness of

reach involves understanding the area of the workspace where a person can change things,

since sometimes a person’s reach can exceed their view.

Awareness of the past involves several additional elements. Action and artifact history

concern the details of events that have already occurred, and event history concerns the

timing of when things happened. The remaining three elements deal with the historical side

of presence, location, and action. We do not include elements relating to the future in our

framework, because designers are unlikely to be able to support maintenance of those

elements. This is because past and present information can be determined from raw

perceptual information, whereas belief about the future involves inference, extrapolation,

and prediction.


Category Element Specific questions Who Presence Is anyone in the workspace? Identity Who is participating? Who is that? Authorship Who is doing that? What Action What are they doing? Intention What goal is that action part of? Artifact What object are they working on? Where Location Where are they working? Gaze Where are they looking? View Where can they see? Reach Where can they reach?

Table 1. Elements of workspace awareness relating to the present

Category Element Specific questions How Action history How did that operation happen? Artifact history How did this artifact come to be in this state? When Event history When did that event happen? Who (past) Presence history Who was here, and when? Where (past) Location history Where has a person been? What (past) Action history What has a person been doing?

Table 2. Elements of workspace awareness relating to the past

Workspace awareness knowledge will be made up of these elements in some combination,

and participants in a face-to-face group activity will generally know the basic elements

(consciously or unconsciously). This does not mean, however, that the designer should

support all elements equally in the interface. Two factors are critical in determining how

the designer should treat each element. First, the degree of interaction between the

participants in the activity indicates how specific or general the information in the interface

should be. Second, the dynamism of the element—how often the information changes—

indicates how often the interface will need to be updated. In some situations, certain

elements never change, and so do not require explicit support in the interface. For example,


if the participants in an activity are always assigned to particular areas of the workspace,

there is little need for the system to gather and distribute location information.

Although there will also be additional kinds of information specific to the task or the work

setting, these basic elements provide a high-level organization of workspace awareness.

The elements are a starting point for thinking about the awareness requirements of

particular task situations, and provide a vocabulary for describing and comparing awareness

support in groupware applications.

6. Framework Part two: How is workspace awareness information gathered?

The groupware designer must attempt to present awareness information in ways that make

the maintenance of workspace awareness simple and straightforward. We believe that this

will be easier if people can gather information in familiar ways, even though the actual

interface devices in a groupware system may not be familiar. This means understanding the

mechanisms people use to gather workspace awareness information from the workspace

environment—basically, how people find the answers to the who, what, where, when, and

how questions listed in Tables 1 and 2. In this section, we outline some of the ways that

people find those answers.

Prior research suggests three main sources of workspace awareness information, and three

corresponding mechanisms that people use to gather it (Segal 1994; Norman 1993; Dix et al

1993; Hutchins 1990). People obtain information that is produced by people’s bodies in the

workspace, from workspace artifacts, and from conversations and gestures. The

mechanisms that they use to gather it are called consequential communication, feedthrough,

and intentional communication.

6.1. Bodies and consequential communication

The first information source is the other person’s body in the workspace (e.g. Segal 1994;

Norman 1993; Benford et al 1995). Since most things that people do in a workspace are

done through some bodily action, the position, posture, and movement of heads, arms, eyes,


and hands provide a wealth of information about what’s going on. Therefore, watching

other people work is a primary mechanism for gathering awareness information: “whenever

activity is visible, it becomes an essential part of the flow of information fundamental for

creating and sustaining teamwork” (Segal 1994, p. 24). Although people also contribute to

the auditory environment, much of the perception of a body in a workspace is visual. In all

of the tabletop tasks that we observed, for example, participants would regularly turn their

heads to watch their partners work.

The mechanism of seeing and hearing other people active in the workspace is called

consequential communication: information transfer that emerges as a consequence of a

person’s activity within an environment (Segal 1994). This kind of bodily communication,

however, is not intentional in the way that explicit gestures are: the producer of the

information does not intentionally undertake actions to inform the other person, and the

perceiver merely picks up what is available. Nevertheless, consequential communication

provides a great deal of information. In a study of piloting teams, Segal reports that:

[Pilots] spent most of their time—over 60%—looking across at their [partner’s] display while it was being manipulated. This suggests that beyond the information provided by the display itself, these pilots were specifically looking for information provided by the dynamic interaction between their crewmembers and that display (p. 24).

This study also suggests that movement is particularly important in consequential

communication, since our attention is naturally drawn to motion. Norman (1993) gives an

example , when he relates the value of “obvious actions” in aircraft cockpits:

When the captain reaches across the cockpit over to the first officer’s side and lowers the landing-gear lever, the motion is obvious: the first officer can see it even without paying conscious attention. The motion not only controls the landing gear, but just as important, it acts as a natural communication between the two pilots, letting both know the action has been done. (p. 142)

6.2. Artifacts and feedthrough

The artifacts in the workspace are a second source of awareness information (e.g. Dix et al

1993; Gaver 1991). Artifacts provide several sorts of visual information: they are physical

objects, they form spatial relationships to other objects, they contain visual symbols like


words, pictures, and numbers, and their states are often shown in their physical

representation. Artifacts also contribute to the acoustic environment, making characteristic

sounds when they are created, destroyed, moved, stacked, divided, or manipulated in other

ways (Gaver 1991). Tools in particular have signature sounds, such as the snip of scissors

or the scratch of a pencil. By seeing or hearing the ways that an artifact changes, it is often

possible to determine what is being done to it.

This mechanism is feedthrough (Dix et al 1993): when artifacts are manipulated, they give

off information, and what would normally be feedback to the person performing the action

can also inform others who are watching. When both the artifact and the actor can be seen,

feedthrough is coupled with consequential communication; at other times, there may be a

spatial or temporal separation between the artifact and the actor, leaving feedthrough as the

only vehicle for information. For example, in our observations of the Calgary air traffic

control center (Appendix 1), the departures controller cannot monitor all of the arrival

controller’s actions, but can see the status of arriving aircraft on their display change from

“approaching” to “landed.” When they see this change in the artifact, they can also infer the

activities of the arrivals controller.

6.3. Conversation, gesture, and intentional communication

A third source of information that is ubiquitous in collaboration is conversation and

gesture, and their mechanism is intentional communication (e.g. Clark 1996; Heath and

Luff 1995; Birdwhistell, 1952). Verbal conversations are the prevalent form of

communication in most groups, and there are three ways in which awareness information

can be picked up from verbal exchanges. First, people may explicitly talk about awareness

elements with their partners, and simply state where they are working and what they are

doing. Our observations of shared-workspace tasks suggest that these direct discussions

happen primarily when someone asks a specific question such as “what are you doing?” or

when the group is planning or replanning the division of labour.

Second, people can gather awareness information by overhearing others’ conversations.

Although a conversation between two people may not explicitly include a third person, it is


understood that the exchange is public information that others can pick up. For example,

navigation teams on navy ships talk on an open circuit, which means that everyone can hear

each others’ conversations. Hutchins (1990) details how members of the team listen in on

these conversations, either to monitor the actions of a junior member, or to learn from more

experienced members. For this reason, voice loops—audio channels that allow directed and

overheard communication among spatially separate sub-groups of people—have evolved as

standard practice in mission control domains such as air traffic management, aircraft carrier

operations, and space mission control (Watts et al, 1996).

Third, people can pick up others’ verbal shadowing, the running commentary that people

commonly produce alongside their actions, spoken to no one in particular. Heath and Luff

(1995) have observed this behaviour, which they call “outlouds.” They note that although

these “outlouds…might be thought relatively incursive, potentially interrupting activities

being undertaken by [others] in the room, [they are] perhaps less obtrusive than actually

informing particular persons” (p. 157).

The style of verbal shadowing can be explicit or highly indirect. In our observations of a

newspaper-layout task (Appendix 1), participants regularly stated exactly what they were

doing, saying things like “I’m going to cut this article,” or “I’ll move this over here.” In

other work situations like the London Underground (Heath and Luff 1992), controllers talk

more to themselves and use oblique references like curses or song phrases, but are

nevertheless able to convey information to others in the control room.

Gestures and other visual actions can also be used to carry out intentional communication.

These differ from consequential communication in that they are intended, and are often

used alongside verbal productions. Short, Williams, and Christie (1976) note two forms of

visual communication used to convey task information. First is illustration, where speech is

illustrated, acted out, or emphasized. For example, people often illustrate distances by

showing a gap between fingers or hands. The second form is the emblem, where words are

replaced by actions: for example, a nod or shake of the head indicates ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (p. 45).

These types of gestures have also been observed in CSCW studies (e.g. Ishii and Kobayashi

1992, Tang 1991).


7. Framework Part three: How is workspace awareness used in collaboration?

A groupware designer needs to know the situations and activities where workspace

awareness will be used, to better analyze collaborative tasks and to better determine when

groupware support is called for. Workspace awareness is used for many things in

collaboration. Awareness can reduce effort, increase efficiency, and reduce errors for the

activities of collaboration. This section describes five types of activity—collected from the

literature and as seen in our observational studies (Appendix 1) —that are aided by

workspace awareness (e.g. Tatar et al 1991; Clark 1996; Tang 1991; Salvador et al 1996).

These provide a basic set of collaborative activities that designers can look for as they

analyse work situations. The five activities are: management of coupling, simplification of

verbal communication, coordination, anticipation, and assistance.

7.1. Management of coupling

Several researchers have recognized that when people collaborate, they shift back and forth

between individual and shared work, and that awareness of others is important for

managing these transitions. For example, Dourish and Bellotti (1992) observed that people

involved in a shared editing task “continually moved between concurrent, but more or less

independent, work… to very tightly focused group consideration of single items. These

movements were opportunistic and unpredictable, relying on awareness of the state of the

rest of the group” (p. 111). Gaver (1991) adds that “people shift from working alone to

working together, even when joined on a shared task. Building systems that support these

transitions is important, if difficult” (p. 295).

Salvador et al (1996) call the degree to which people are working together coupling3. In

general terms, coupling is the amount of work that one person can do before they require

discussion, instruction, action, information, or consultation with another person. Some of

3 This is different from Dewan and Choudhary’s (1991) earlier notion of coupling, which involves coupling

between interface elements in shared interfaces.


the reasons that people may move from loose to tight coupling are that they see an

opportunity to collaborate, that they need to come together to discuss or decide something,

that they need to plan their next activity, or that they have reached a stage of their task that

requires another person’s involvement. A sense of awareness about what another person is

doing makes each of these situations more feasible, by allowing people to recognize when

tighter coupling could be appropriate.

Heath and Luff (1995) give the example of a financial dealing office, where dealers manage

coupling by carefully monitoring their colleagues’ activities:

…though dealers may be engaged in an individual task, they remain sensitive to the conduct of colleagues and the possibility of collaboration… ‘Peripheral’ monitoring or participation is an essential feature of both individual and collaborative work within these environments. ( p. 156)

So, for example, it is not unusual in the dealing room for individuals to time, with precision, an utterance which engenders collaboration, so that it coincides with a colleague finishing writing out a ticket or swallowing a mouthful of lunch. By monitoring the course of action in this way and by prospectively identifying its upcoming boundaries, individuals can successfully initiate collaboration so that it does not interrupt an activity in which a colleague is engaged. (p. 152)

Although these examples deal with a wider environment than a flat shared workspace, the

idea is the same—that people keep track of others’ activities when they are working in a

loosely coupled manner, for the express purpose of determining appropriate times to initiate

closer coupling. Without workspace awareness information, people will miss opportunities

to collaborate, and will often interrupt the other person inappropriately.

7.2. Simplification of communication

Through workspace awareness, people can use the workspace and the artifacts in it to

simplify their verbal communication, thus making interaction more efficient. When

discussion involves task artifacts, the workspace can be used as an external representation

of the task that allows efficient nonverbal communication (Hutchins 1990; Clark 1996).

That is, the artifacts act as conversational props (Brinck and Gomez 1992) that let people

mix verbal and visual communication. Workspace awareness is important because

interpreting the visual signals depends on knowledge of where in the workspace they occur,


what objects they relate to, and what the sender is doing. The nonverbal actions simplify

dialogue by reducing the length and complexity of utterances. Four kinds of these

communicative actions have been previously observed in studies of face-to-face

collaboration: deictic reference, demonstration, manifesting actions, and visual evidence.

Deictic references. Referential communication involves composing a message that will

allow another person to choose a thing from a set of objects (Krauss and Fussell 1990).

When transcripts of a collaborative activity are reviewed, however, many of these messages

are almost unintelligible without knowledge of what was going on in the workspace at the

time. For example, consider a fragment from a transcript of a puzzle task (Appendix 1):

A: How about this thing…<points to diagram>…the tail? The only thing that can be is… B: <holds up a piece> No, not that. B: <holds up another piece> This thing? It could be that thing <points to diagram>… A: Yeah, could be that thing… A: <holds up another piece> Could be that thing…

The verbal communication does not convey what people are pointing at or indicating when

they say “this,” “that,” “here,” or “there.” The practice of pointing or gesturing to indicate a

noun used in conversation is called deictic reference, and is ubiquitous in shared

workspaces (e.g. Segal 1995; Tatar et al 1991; Tang 1991). For example, in a flight

simulation experiment with two pilots, Segal (1994) found that many of the transcribed

utterances could not be interpreted without reference to a videotape of the cockpit displays.

Deictic reference is a crucial part of the way we communicate in a shared space. As Seely

Brown and colleagues (1989) state:

Perhaps the best way to discover the importance and efficiency of indexical terms and their embedding context is to imagine discourse without them. Authors of a collaborative work will recognize the problem if they have ever discussed the paper over the phone. “What you say here” is not a very useful remark. Here in this setting needs an elaborate description (such as “page 3, second full paragraph, fifth sentence, beginning…”) and can often lead to conversations at cross purposes. The problem gets harder in conferences calls when you becomes as ambiguous as here… The contents of a shared environment make a central contribution to conversation. (p. 36)


Demonstrations. In addition to gestures used to illustrate conversation (e.g. Clark 1996),

people use gestures in workspaces to demonstrate actions or the behaviour of artifacts. As

Tang (1989) states, “ideas are often enacted gesturally in order to express them effectively

to others, especially if they involve a dynamic sequence of actions” (p. 76). Common

demonstrations include tracing a path in the workspace with a finger or illustrating how an

artifact operates. For example, Tang (1989) observed a participant in a design session

turning her hand over to demonstrate how a card would flip back and forth (p. 76).

Manifesting actions. Actions in the workspace can also replace verbal communication

entirely. When people replace an explicit verbal utterance with an action in the shared

workspace, they are performing a manifesting action (Clark, 1996). Placing my groceries

on the counter tells the clerk “I wish to purchase these items” without me having to say so.

However, manifesting actions must be carried out carefully to prevent them being mistaken

as ordinary actions: the action must be stylized, exaggerated, or conspicuous enough that

the “listener” will not mistake it (Clark, p. 169). Therefore, I must place my groceries on

the counter in such a way that the clerk realizes I am making a purchase request and not just

resting my arms.

Visual evidence. When people converse, they require evidence that their utterances have

been understood. In verbal communication, a common form of this evidence is back-

channel feedback. In shared workspaces, however, visual actions can also provide evidence

of understanding or misunderstanding. Clark (1996) provides an example from an everyday

setting, where Ben is getting Charlotte to center a candlestick in a display:

Ben: Okay, now, push it farther—farther—a little more—right there. Good. (p. 326)

Charlotte moves the candlestick after each of Ben’s utterances, providing visual evidence

that she has understood his instructions and has carried them out to the best of her

interpretation. This kind of evidence can be used whenever people carry out joint projects

involving the artifacts in a shared workspace.

The success of these four kinds of nonverbal communication depends on two aspects of

workspace awareness. First, and most obvious, the communicative action must be


perceived before it can be understood; if the action is invisible, it is impossible to interpret.

For example, if I cannot see that you are pointing, or what you are pointing at, I cannot

ground your deictic reference. Second, the receiver needs to have an idea of the workspace

context in which the visible actions occur, since the meaning of the action may be

ambiguous without certain information. For example, if there are several green blocks in

the workspace, seeing only that you are pointing to a green block may not be enough

information to correctly ground the reference. Or, if you hand me an object in a way that

appears to be a request, I may need knowledge of your current activities before I can

determine your expectations.

The important thing here is that the sender has to understand what the receiver can see in

order to construct useful non-verbal communications. This means that workspace

awareness is part of conversational common ground in a shared workspace. Common

ground is the mutual knowledge that people take advantage of to increase their

communicative efficiency (Clark 1996). The principle of least collaborative effort suggests

that people expend only the minimum effort in composing an utterance that they believe is

necessary for their message to get across to the hearer (Clark and Brennan 1991). If they

can exploit common ground, they can reduce the work that goes into communication.

Without common ground, people must do more work to compose exact, complete, and

literal utterances. Workspace awareness as common ground means that people can further

simplify their communication even without visual productions. They do this by assuming

that the other person’s awareness will help them correctly interpret highly underspecified

utterances. For example, if I believe that you know where I am and what I’m working on, I

can say something like “do you think that it will fit?” instead of “do you think that the

smaller of the two arches will fit at the top of the tower that’s at the right side of the

picture?,” a much more complicated and exact utterance.

7.3. Coordination of actions

Coordinating actions in a collaborative activity means making them happen in the right

order, at the right time, and generally, making them meet the constraints of the task.

Coordination is necessary at several levels of granularity, from small hand movements to


large-scale divisions of labour. In addition, certain kinds of joint activities require the

concerted action of two people.

Coordination can be accomplished in two ways in a shared workspace: “one is by explicit

communication about how the work is to be performed…another is less explicit, mediated

by the shared material used in the work process” (Robinson 1991, p. 42). This second, less

explicit way uses workspace awareness. Awareness aids both fine and coarse-grained

coordination, since it informs participants about the temporal and spatial boundaries of

others’ actions, and since it helps them fit the next action into the stream. Workspace

awareness is particularly evident in continuous action where people are working with the

same objects. For example, CSCW researchers have noted that concurrency locks are less

important or even unnecessary when participants have adequate information about what

objects others are currently using; when the awareness information is available, people can

use social protocols to coordinate access to objects (Greenberg and Marwood 1994).

Another example is the way that people manage to avoid bumping into each others’ hands

in a confined space. Tang (1989) saw this kind of coordination in design activity:

the physical closeness among the participants…allows a peripheral awareness of the other participants and their actions, as evidenced in the many ‘coordinated dances’ observed among the hands of the collaborators in the workspace. There were many episodes of intricate coordinated hand motions, such as getting out of the way of an approaching hand or avoiding collisions with other hands. These coordinated actions indicate a keen peripheral awareness of the other participants… (p. 95)

Workspace awareness is also useful in the coordination and division of labour and in the

planning and replanning of the activity. As the task progresses, groups regularly reorganize

what each person will do next. These decisions depend in part on elements of workspace

awareness—what the other participants have done, what they are still going to do, and what

is left to do in the task. Based on another person’s activities, I may decide to begin a

complementary task, to assist them with their job, or to move to a different area of the

workspace to avoid a conflict. It may be more efficient to have the members of the group

do work that is near in proximity or in nature to what they are currently doing or have done

in the past. Knowing activities and locations, therefore, can help in determining who should


do what task next. For example, in one of the puzzle tasks we observed, the structure was

symmetric, and people would regularly choose to do the symmetrical complement to their

partner’s action immediately after the partner had completed it.

7.4. Anticipation

Another common behaviour in collaboration is anticipation, where people take action based

on their expectations or predictions of what others will do in the future (Tang 1989; Hall

1959). People anticipate others in several ways. They can prepare for their next action in a

concerted activity, they can avoid conflicts, or they can provide materials, resources, or

tools before they are needed.

Anticipation is based on prediction, and people can predict workspace actions at both small

and large time scales. First, people can predict some types of events by extrapolating

forward from the immediate past. For example, if I see someone reaching towards a pair of

scissors, I might predict that they are going to grab them. This prediction allows me to

anticipate the event: I might pick up the scissors and pass them to the reacher, I might

replan my own movements to avoid a collision, or I might reach for them myself to grab

them before the other person gets them. This kind of anticipation is integral to the fine-

grained coordination discussed above. Although ordinary, anticipation is difficult without

workspace awareness—in the scissors example, without up-to-the-moment knowledge of

where the other person’s hand is moving, and of their location in relation to the scissors. In

addition to this information, my prediction could have also taken into account other

workspace awareness knowledge, such as their current activities and whether they were

doing something that required scissors.

When prediction happens at a larger time scale, people learn which elements of situations

and tasks are repeated and invariant. People are experts at recognizing patterns in events,

and quickly begin to predict what will come next in situations that they have been in before.

Workspace awareness is again important, but this time provides people with the

information they need to determine whether others’ behaviour match the patterns that they

have learned. For example, in air traffic control, regional controllers hand flights off to the


Calgary controllers when they come within 35 miles of the city. The transfer is done

entirely through the shared workspace. The regional controller tags the aircraft’s icon, and

the Calgary controller must acknowledge the handoff by pressing a command key while

their trackball cursor is overtop the aircraft. This handoff procedure is done for each flight,

so the controllers are extremely familiar with it. Accordingly, the Calgary controllers

anticipate the handoff, based on the information available in the workspace and their

experience of what the regional controllers do in this situation. When a Calgary controller

sees an incoming aircraft appear on the edge of the radar screen, they will often move their

cursor over the aircraft, waiting for the handoff indicator from the regional controller to

appear.

7.5. Assistance

Assisting others with their local tasks is an integral part of collaboration, and one that also

benefits from workspace awareness. Assistance was extremely common in the tasks we

observed, but not usually explicit. Often, one participant would make some indirect

statement indicating that they wanted assistance, and their partner would look over and

leave their tasks for a few moments to help out, and then return to what they were doing.

For example, one participant was unable to find a piece that she needed for the cathedral

puzzle task (Appendix 1), and so indirectly asked her partner for assistance:

A: Do you have another one of these guys here? <holds up piece>

B: They’re, uh, red?

A: Yeah.

B: Yep, there’s one…<hands piece to A>

People were also able to provide assistance without a prior request. In the same task, one

participant simply reached over and placed a piece for the other:

A: Oh, and I found another triangle thing for you…here. <places piece>

Awareness in these situations is useful because it helps people determine what assistance is

required and what is appropriate. In order to assist someone with their tasks, you need to

know what they are doing, what their goals are, what stage they are at in their tasks, and the


state of their work area. In the second example above, the helper knew what their partner

had already completed; in particular, that she had not yet found all of the needed “triangle

things,” and that adding one to the cathedral would be beneficial.

This section has outlined five kinds of collaborative activity that are aided by greater

workspace awareness; these are summarized in Table 3 below. Groupware designers can

use this part of the framework in two ways: first, as an analysis tool to help them determine

the degree of awareness support that is needed for a particular work situation (since

different collaborative situations involve these activities in different amounts); and second,

as a guide to determining where in the interface that awareness support should be provided.

In the next section, we discuss some of the ways in which awareness support can be

provided in the interface.

Activity Benefit of workspace awareness Management of coupling Assists people in noticing and managing transitions

between individual and shared work Simplification of communication Allows people to the use of the workspace and artifacts

as conversational props, including mechanisms of deixis, demonstrations, and visual evidence

Coordination of action Assists people in planning and executing low-level workspace actions to mesh seamlessly with others.

Anticipation Allows people to predict others’ actions and activity at several time scales.

Assistance Assists people in understanding the context where help is to be provided.

Table 3. Summary of the activities in which workspace awareness is used.

8. Examples: applying the workspace awareness framework to interface design

The framework describes what the elements of workspace awareness are, what mechanisms

are used to maintain it, and when it is useful in collaborative work situations. In this

section, we look at several ways designers can apply the e knowledge of the framework.

We give examples of how a designer can use the framework: to think about the

representation and placement of awareness information within the interface; to analyze and


categorize existing awareness techniques, displays and widgets; and to inform the design

evolution of a particular awareness widget.

We caution that these are representative and illustrative examples, rather than as an

exhaustive list of previous work. We do not attempt to explain the details of approaches or

interface widgets. Also, the awareness displays and widgets used in these examples are

oriented towards only one part of the process of maintaining awareness—making

information available—so designers must also consider whether people interpret the

information correctly, and whether their resulting actions are appropriate. Our examples are

also biased towards our own experiences: many of the techniques presented arise from our

work with the GroupKit groupware toolkit (Roseman and Greenberg 1996).

8.1 Organizing display space

Our first example suggests how a designer can think about the general representation and

placement of how awareness information is presented within the interface. A designer faces

basic questions of where and how to display workspace awareness information in a

groupware interface. We have determined two basic dimensions that provide boundaries for

some of these questions. First, when considering where information will be displayed, the

dimension of placement draws a basic distinction between information that is situated

within the workspace and information that is presented separate from it. Situated placement

implies that the information is displayed at the workspace location where it originated, and

separate placement means displaying the information outside the workspace in a separate

part of the interface. Second, the issue of how information will be displayed suggests the

dimension of presentation: a display can be either literal or symbolic. Literal presentation

implies that the information is shown in the same form that it is gathered, and includes low-

level movement and feedback. Symbolic presentations extract particular information from

the original data stream and display it explicitly. These two dimensions combine to form

the matrix shown in Table 4.


Placement Situated Separate

Literal Presentation

Symbolic

Table 4. Presentation and placement of awareness display techniques.

Of these divisions, the approach that holds perhaps the most promise for natural and

effective awareness support is the situated-literal approach. Here, awareness information is

integrated into the workspace’s existing representation, and is shown in the same form that

it was produced by another person. This approach is the closest approximation of how

awareness information appears in the real world, and it is the only one that allows people to

use their existing skills with the mechanisms of feedthrough, consequential communication,

and gestural communication. In addition, situated and literal information best supports the

three activities in the perception-action cycle that people use to maintain awareness: it is

available in the environment but need not be attended to all the time; it provides low-level

information that can be interpreted in light of other existing knowledge; and it allows

further exploration or action to be taken in the same context in which the information was

gathered. Situating awareness information, however, raises the possibility that people may

not notice important events; furthermore, there is no guarantee with any awareness

technique that people are going to interpret the information correctly or use it effectively.

Two critical design elements of the situated-literal approach are embodiment and expressive

artifacts. Embodiments are visible representation of each person’s body in the workspace—

representations that have been used include telepointers (Hayne, Pendergast, and Greenberg

1993), view rectangles (Beaudoin-Lafon and Karsenty 1992), avatars (Benford et al 1995),

and video images (Tang and Minneman 1991, Ishii and Kobayashi 1992). Depending upon

its expressiveness, a workspace embodiment can provide information about who is in the

workspace, where they are, and what they are doing, and can afford both consequential and

gestural communication. The third mechanism, feedthrough, is provided by expressive

artifacts - artifacts that maximize the amount of usable awareness information produced for


the group. Although the design of specific artifacts cannot be predetermined, there are

general strategies for designing and displaying common types of manipulations that

increase expressiveness, such as action indicators or action animations (Gutwin and

Greenberg 1998).

One particular drawback to the situated-literal approach is that of visibility—when

information is situated in the workspace, others have to be looking at the appropriate part of

the workspace in order to see the information. This can be a severe problem in relaxed-

WYSIWIS systems that allow people to scroll to entirely different parts of the workspace.

A solution to this problem is to provide multiple views that offer visibility to awareness

information in unseen parts of the workspace; for example, radar views (Smith et al 1998)

show information in the entire workspace. In the next section, we map techniques from

both the situated-literal approach and other parts of the design space to the elements of

workspace awareness.

8.2 Techniques, displays, and widgets

Our second example shows how a designer can use the workspace awareness framework to

analyze and categorize existing techniques, displays and widgets. Tables 5, 6, and 7 below

use the elements of workspace awareness to organize a variety of awareness displays and

techniques that have appeared in previous literature. We concentrate here on real-time

aspects of workspace awareness - elements that answer the who, what, and where questions.

The techniques are grouped according to what workspace awareness elements are

supported; some displays appear several times since they support more than one element of

awareness. This review is intended as an illustrative and representative list rather than an

exhaustive one, and due to our familiarity with GroupKit, is slightly skewed towards

solutions that have been built with that toolkit.

WA Element Example Interface Techniques Who Presence (Is anyone there?)

• Participant list (e.g. Sohlenkamp and Chwelos 1994). The most basic awareness display, the participant list shows who is currently logged in to the system (although several other types of awareness information can be added to this basic idea). Presence is shown by presence in the list.


• Embodiment solutions (telepointers, view rectangles, avatars, video images). Since an embodiment is a representation of an actual person, presence is shown by the existence of the embodiment. In some cases, presence can also be heard if embodiments emit sound as they interact with the workspace (Gaver 1991)

Identity (Who is that?)

• Participant list identifies participants with a name or picture. • Embodiments show identity through visual characteristics of the representation,

such as colour (telepointers or view rectangles), shape and appearance (avatars), or actual images (video techniques)

Authorship (Who is doing that?)

• Creation colouring (e.g. Mitchell 1996). When activities involve the creation of new artifacts, the objects (such as characters in a text window) can be coloured to indicate authorship.

• Embodiment proximity. The proximity of a person’s representation to an action is a strong authorship clue in direct-manipulation environments.

• Authorship lines (e.g. Sohlenkamp and Chwelos 1994). Lines drawn from actions or artifacts to a participant list to indicate authorship.

Table 5. Workspace awareness techniques for “who” questions.

WA Element Example Interface Techniques What Action (Is anything happening? What is she doing?)

• Activity and change indicators (e.g. Ackerman and Starr 1995). “Change meters” placed in the interface to indicate the occurrence or rate of activity or edits in the workspace.

• Consequential communication through embodiment. People’s workspace representations convey both that actions are happening, and also what actions are occurring through characteristic motions.

• Mode indicators. Representations of the mode in which each person is working. Modes can be shown separately (in a participant list) or can be situated. For example, telepointers can show each person’s mode in a drawing program (e.g. Greenberg and Bohnet 1991).

• Action indicators and animations. Actions that are hard to see can be made artificially more perceptible with visible indicators; actions that are instantaneous can be lengthened with animations (e.g. Gutwin and Greenberg 1998)

• Visibility of actions (Smith et al 1998; Gutwin, Greenberg, and Roseman 1995). Separate views of the workspace provide visibility to actions that are in other parts of the workspace. Radar views show the entire workspace. Over-the-shoulder views show a miniature version of another person’s main view. Cursor’s-eye views show the area immediately around another person’s cursor in full detail.

• Audible actions. Others’ actions can be represented with sound to show both existence and type of activity (e.g. Gaver 1991).

Intention (What is she going to do?)

• Embodiment frame rate. Showing embodiments at a real-time frame rate allows observers to accurately predict movements and anticipate actions (e.g. Gutwin 2000)

• Marking artifacts. Explicit notification of future intentions by visibly marking workspace artifacts (e.g. Gutwin, Roseman, and Greenberg 1996)

Artifact (What object is

• Embodiment proximity. The proximity of embodiment to an artifact is a strong clue in direct-manipulation environments.


she using?) • Artifact indicators. Artifacts that are currently being edited can be represented on a separate display such as a participant list.

• Characteristic sounds. Different objects can produce different types of sounds, giving some indication of which artifact is in use (e.g. Gaver 1991).

Table 6. Awareness techniques for “what” questions

WA Element Example Interface Techniques Where Location (Where is she working?)

• Embodiment techniques show location by the position of the person’s representation. Outside the main workspace view, visibility techniques such as radar views are required.

• Radar or gestalt views (Smith et al 1998, Baecker et al 1993). These show location using view rectangles and telepointers on a miniature of a two-dimensional workspace.

• Multi-user scrollbars (Baecker et al 1993). These show location using view bars in one-dimensional workspaces.

• Distortion-oriented workspace representations. The visibility problem can also be addressed by always showing the entire workspace in the main view, and then using magnification techniques to show detail (e.g. Greenberg, Gutwin, and Cockburn 1995).

• Sound distance. Activity sounds can indicate distance and location of activity by changes in volume and direction (e.g. Smith 1999).

• Location indicators. In structured environments (such as rooms-based systems), indications of location can be placed on a separate display such as a participant list (e.g. Roseman and Greenberg 1996)

Gaze (Where is she looking?)

• Eye-contact video. Certain types of video embodiments show gaze direction accurately (Ishii and Kobayashi 1992).

• Embodiment position. The position of the control part of an embodiment (e.g. the telepointer or the hand of an avatar) is often a reasonable clue as to a person’s gaze direction.

View (What can she see?)

• View rectangles. Explicit representations of another person’s view show what they can see in detail (e.g. Beaudoin-Lafon and Karsenty 1995)

• Duplicate views. The over-the-shoulder view provides a miniature of another person’s detail view (Gutwin, Greenberg, and Roseman 1995)

• View slaving. Being able to temporarily switch to another person’s view shows what they can see in full detail (Gutwin, Roseman, and Greenberg 1996)

Reach (What can she manipulate)

• View rectangles. Representations of a person’s detail view indicate what a person can reach for detailed work; overviews show what can be reached for large-scale manipulation (often the entire workspace)

Table 7. Workspace awareness techniques for “where” questions


8.3 Case study - evolution of a radar view

Our third example shows how the awareness framework can inform the design evolution of

a particular awareness widget, in this case a radar view built for the GroupKit toolkit. Radar

views are secondary windows used with a detailed view of the shared workspace; they

show miniatures of the artifacts in a shared workspace, and can also be used to show

awareness information about the participants in the session. Our original radar view showed

only the movement of workspace objects (Figure 1a). As we worked with the display in a

newspaper-layout domain, it became apparent that several aspects of awareness were not

well supported.

1a. 1b. 1c.

Figure 1. Three versions of the GroupKit radar view. Version 1a shows object movement only; 1b adds location information by showing each person’s main view as a shaded rectangle; 1c adds photographs for participant identification.

In analysing the drawbacks of the device for the tasks being carried out, the WA framework

was used as an analysis tool to help identify which elements of awareness should be better

supported. We determined that more information about location, activity, and identity was

required for some tasks. This led to two redesigns. To the version in Figure 1b, we added

location information with shaded viewport rectangles and miniature telepointers, and to the

version in Figure 1c, we added portraits for participant identification.

We also used the idea perception-action cycle to change the way that the radar works. The

first two versions of the radar are display only, and we found that people were having

difficulty acting on information that they gathered from the window (Gutwin, Roseman,

and Greenberg 1996). Therefore, the third version of the radar was made into a fully


interactive secondary workspace rather than a view-only display: people can interact with

its objects, and moving the telepointer over it lets people gesture anywhere within it. Our

evaluations confirm that users do find the later devices more useful for some kinds of

collaborative tasks (e.g. Gutwin, Roseman, and Greenberg 1996; Gutwin and Greenberg

1998).

The features added to the radar view, and the elements of workspace awareness that they

support, are shown in table 8 below.

Feature added Awareness elements Mechanism Object movement Action, artifact Feedthrough View rectangles Identity, location, view, reach Consequential communication Radar telepointers Identity, location, action,

intention Consequential communication

Participant photos Identity Embodiment Table 8. Awareness elements supported by features of the radar view.

9. Summary of the workspace awareness framework

Workspace awareness is the up-to-the-moment understanding of another person’s

interaction with the shared workspace. The conceptual framework sets out basic issues that

designers need to consider when building workspace awareness support into groupware

systems. The framework describes three aspects of workspace awareness: its component

elements, the mechanisms used to maintain it, and its uses in collaboration. These parts

correspond to three tasks that the groupware designer must undertake in supporting

workspace awareness: understand what information to provide, determine how the

knowledge will be gathered, and determine when and where the knowledge will be used.

The framework is illustrated in Figure 5, overlaid on Neisser’s original perception-action

cycle. In addition, we add a new link to the cycle (action) to indicate that people take action

based on their knowledge as well as exploring the environment.


Determine what to look for next

• selective attention

• expectations of future activity

• explicit requests for WA information

Interpret perceptual information

Interpretation is aided by:

• knowledge of the workspaces

• knowledge of the task

• knowledge of the participants

• other WA knowledge

Uses of WA in collaboration

• simplification of communication

• coordination of actions and activities

• anticipation of events

• provision of assistance

• management of coupling

WA Knowledge

Who

Where

What

When

How

Environment

Knowledge

Gather perceptual information

• consequential communication

• feedthrough

• verbal & non-verbal communication

Exploration

Action

Figure 5. The workspace awareness framework

The elements of workspace awareness answer who, where, when, how, and what questions.

They deal with issues like who is present and who is responsible for actions, where people

are working and where they can see, and what actions they are performing and what their

intentions are. Other elements of workspace awareness consider awareness of history and

past events. The elements are a starting point for thinking about the awareness requirements

of particular task situations, and provide a vocabulary for describing and comparing

awareness support in groupware applications.

Workspace awareness is maintained through a perception-action cycle in which people

gather perceptual information from the environment, integrate it with what they already

know, and use it to look for more information in the workspace. Information is gathered

primarily through three mechanisms. First, the presence and movement of hands and bodies


in the workspace provide consequential communication. Second, movement and changes to

artifacts in the workspace provides feedthrough information. Third, information is gathered

through intentional communication, which can be either verbal or gestural. People are

already familiar with these three ways of gathering workspace awareness information, from

their experiences in face-to-face workspaces. In groupware, designers can simplify

information-gathering by using these mechanisms in their awareness displays, even though

the displays themselves will likely bear little resemblance to face-to-face environments.

Workspace awareness is useful for making collaborative interaction more efficient, less

effortful, and less error-prone. There are several activities of collaboration where the

benefits of workspace awareness are evident: in helping people to recognize opportunities

for closer coupling, in reducing the effort needed for verbal communication, in simplifying

coordination, in allowing people to act in anticipation of others, and in providing context

for appropriate help and assistance. Designers can use this part of the framework as an

analysis tool to help them determine the awareness support that is needed for a particular

work situation, and as a guide to determining where in the interface that awareness support

should be provided.

The role of the framework in the groupware design process is not as a prescriptive design

guide, but rather as a structured collection of knowledge that can assist the iterative

development of awareness support. The framework identifies three steps that designers

should undertake—think about what information to provide, what perceptual mechanisms

to use to convey the information, and when and where in the interface to provide the

information—and provides a set of alternatives and possibilities for each step.

The knowledge in the conceptual framework will allow designers to build more usable

groupware, and this knowledge has not previously been available to groupware designers in

one place. However, workspace awareness is only one type of group awareness, and the

knowledge in our framework must be used along with other tools. For example, another

model of awareness in collaborative virtual environments is the focus/nimbus model (e.g.

Benford et al 1995, Rodden 1996). The model offers a way to determine what the level of

awareness should be for two actors in a shared space. The actors’ physical location and the


distance between them are two important factors in the model, and states an inverse

relationship between distance and awareness—the farther you are from someone, the less

aware you should be of them. In addition, the model incorporates the possibility that actors

can affect their own degree of awareness: these capabilities are represented in the concepts

of focus and nimbus. The focus/nimbus model is concerned with large spaces that can

contain many people, and hence the focus on determining how much awareness

information should be provided. Our framework, in contrast, is oriented towards small

groups in medium-sized workspaces where it is more likely that participants are always

interested in maintaining awareness of all the members of the group. Therefore, we see the

focus/nimbus model as a higher-level complement to our framework. The two models can

work together in environments where people can work together at both a large and a small

scale—the focus/nimbus model would operate in the large, and the workspace awareness

model in the small.

10. Conclusion

In this paper we have presented a descriptive theory of awareness for small groups in

shared-workspace groupware. Our motivation for the research is that although the idea of

group awareness shows great promise for improving groupware usability, groupware

designers do not have access to principled information about how to support it in their

interfaces. Our goal, therefore, was to provide developers with useful knowledge about how

to design for awareness in multi-user systems, and in particular, how to design for one kind

of awareness called workspace awareness. The main structure of the descriptive theory is a

framework of workspace awareness that organizes the concept and that informs designers

as they analyse work situations and consider the design of awareness support. The

framework is based on sound psychological principles of what awareness is and how

people maintain it in dynamic environments. The framework can both educate designers

about the importance of awareness in groupware and help to improve the quality of the

systems that are built.


We believe that the foundations and basic structure of the framework can be used to

characterize and describe other types of awareness that affect distributed group work. First,

the perception-action cycle is a general model that can be used to explain how people keep

track of a wide variety of information in a collaborative situation. Second, the three design

issues of what information to present, how to present it, and where and when to present it

apply equally well to supporting (for example) informal awareness and conversational

awareness in groupware. Since workspace awareness is not independent of these other

types, a more comprehensive theory that integrates several different aspects of group

awareness is needed. Extending the framework is one of our current ongoing projects.

Other current work includes assessing the effects of awareness support on groupware

usability (Gutwin and Greenberg 1998a) and developing new awareness displays and

devices (Gutwin and Greenberg 1998b).

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research

Council of Canada, by Intel Corporation and by Microsoft Research. Our thanks to the

anonymous referees for their valuable comments and recommendations.

References

Ackerman, M., and Starr, B., Social Activity Indicators: Interface Components for CSCW Systems, Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 1995, 159-168.

Adams, M., Tenney, Y., and Pew, R., Situation Awareness and the Cognitive Management of Complex Systems, Human Factors, 37(1), 85-104, 1995.

Baecker, R., Nastos, D., Posner, I., and Mawby, K., The User-Centred Iterative Design of Collaborative Writing Software, Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Amsterdam, 1993, 399-405.

Beaudouin-Lafon, M., and Karsenty, A., Transparency and Awareness in a Real-Time Groupware System, Proceedings of the Conference on User Interface and Software Technology, Monterey, CA, 1992, 171-180.

Benford, S., Bowers, J., Fahlen, L., Greenhalgh, C., and Snowdon, D., User Embodiment in Collaborative Virtual Environments, Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’95), 1995, 242-249.


Birdwhistell, Ray L., Introduction to kinesics : an annotation system for analysis of body motion and gesture. University of Kentucky Press, 1952.

Borning, A., and Travers, M., Two Approaches to Casual Interaction over Computer and Video Networks, Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New Orleans, LA, 1991, 13-19.

Brennan, S., Seeking and Providing Evidence for Mutual Understanding, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1990.

Brinck, T., and Gomez, L. M., A collaborative medium for the support of conversational props, Proceedings of Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’92), Toronto, Ontario, 1992, 171-178.

Clark, H., Using Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996.

Clark, H. H., and Brennan, S. E., Grounding in Communication, in Readings in Groupware and Computer Supported Cooperative Work: Assisting Human-Human Collaboration, R. M. Baecker ed., 222-233, Morgan-Kaufmann Publishers, Mountain View, CA, 1991.

Dix, A., Finlay, J., Abowd, G., and Beale, R., Human-Computer Interaction, Prentice Hall, 1993.

Dewan, P., and Choudhary, R., Flexible User Interface Coupling in a Collaborative System. Proceedings of CHI’91, 1991, 41-48.

Dourish, P., and Bellotti, V., Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces, Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Toronto, 1992, 107-114.

Dourish, P., and Bly, S., Portholes: Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Work Group, Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Monterey, CA, 1992, 541-547.

Ellis, C., Gibbs, S., and Rein, G., Groupware: Some Issues and Experiences, Communications of the ACM, 34(1), 38-58, 1991.

Endsley, M., Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems, Human Factors, 37(1), 32-64, 1995.

Gaba, D., Howard, S., and Small, S., Situation Awareness in Anesthesiology, Human Factors, 37(1), 20-31, 1995.

Gaver, W., Sound Support for Collaboration, Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 1991, 293-308.

Gilson, R. D., Introduction to the Special Issue on Situation Awareness, Human Factors, 37(1), 3-4, 1995.

Goodwin, C., Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers, Academic Press, New York, 1981.


Greenberg, S., and Bohnet, R., GroupSketch: A multi-user sketchpad for geographically-distributed small groups, Proceedings of Proceedings of Graphics Interface '91, Calgary, Alberta, 1991.

Greenberg, S., Peepholes: Low Cost Awareness of One’s Community, Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Conference Companion), Vancouver, 1996, 206-207.

Greenberg, S., and Marwood, D., Real Time Groupware as a Distributed System: Concurrency Control and its Effect on the Interface, Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Chapel Hill NC, 1994, 207-217.

Gutwin, C. Slow and Sticky: Effects of Network Delay on Real-Time Groupware. Technical Report 2000-02, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, 2000.

Gutwin, C., Greenberg, S., and Cockburn, A., Using Distortion-Oriented Displays to Support Workspace Awareness, Proceedings of People and Computers XI (BCSHCI'96), London, 1996, 299-314.

Gutwin, C., Greenberg, S. and Roseman, M. (1996). Workspace Awareness in Real-Time Distributed Groupware: Framework, Widgets, and Evaluation. in Sasse, R.J., A. Cunningham, and R. Winder, Editors. People and Computers XI (Proceedings of the HCI'96), pages 281-298, Springer-Verlag.

Gutwin, C., and Greenberg, S., Workspace Awareness for Groupware, Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, 208-209, 1996.

Gutwin, C., Greenberg, S. and Roseman, M. Workspace Awareness in Real-Time Distributed Groupware: Framework, Widgets, and Evaluation. People and Computers XI (Proceedings of HCI '96), Springer-Verlag, 281-298, 1996.

Gutwin, C., Roseman, M., and Greenberg, S., A Usability Study of Awareness Widgets in a Shared Workspace Groupware System, Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Boston, 1996, 258-267.

Gutwin, C., and Greenberg, S. Effects of Awareness Support on Groupware Usability. Proceedings of ACM CHI'98, Los Angeles, ACM Press, 1998a.

Gutwin, C. and Greenberg, S. Design for Individuals, Design for Groups: Tradeoffs between power and workspace awareness. Proceedings of ACM CSCW'98, Seattle, ACM Press, 1998b.

Hall, E. The Silent Language, Doubleday, 1959.

Hayne, S., Pendergast, M., and Greenberg, S. Gesturing through cursors: Implementing multiple pointers in group supports systems. In Proceedings of the HICSS Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE Press, 1993.

Heath, C., Jirotka, M., Luff, P., and Hindmarsh, J., Unpacking Collaboration: the Interactional Organisation of Trading in a City Dealing Room, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 3(2), 147-165, 1995.


Heath, C., and Luff, P., Collaboration and Control: Crisis Management and Multimedia Technology in London Underground Line Control Rooms., Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 1(1-2), 69-94, 1992.

Hutchins, E., The Technology of Team Navigation, in Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work, J. Galegher, R. Kraut and C. Egido ed., 191-220, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1990.

Ishii, H., and Kobayashi, M., ClearBoard: A Seamless Medium for Shared Drawing and Conversation with Eye Contact, Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Monterey, CA, 1992, 525-532.

James, W., The Principles of Psychology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1981 (written 1890).

Krauss, R., and Fussell, S., Mutual Knowledge and Communicative Effectiveness, in Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work, J. Galegher, R. Kraut and C. Egido ed., 111-145, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1990.

McDaniel, S. E. and Brinck, T., Awareness in Collaborative Systems. Workshop Report. SIGCHI Bulletin. October 1997.

McGrath, J., Groups: Interaction and Performance, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1984.

Mitchell, A., Communication and Shared Understanding in Collaborative Writing, M.Sc. thesis, University of Toronto, Toronto, 1996.

Neisser, U., Cognition and Reality, W.H. Freeman, San Fransisco, 1976.

Norman, D., Things That Make Us Smart, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1993.

Robinson, M., Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: Cases and Concepts, Proceedings of Groupware ‘91, 1991, 59-75.

Rodden, T. Populating the Application: A Model of Awareness for Cooperative Applications, Proceedings of ACM CSCW'96 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 1996 p.87-96.

Roseman, M., and Greenberg, S., Building Real-Time Groupware with GroupKit, a Groupware Toolkit, Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 3(1), 66-106, 1996.

Roseman, M., and Greenberg, S., TeamRooms: Network Places for Collaboration, Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Boston, 1996.

Salas, E., Prince, C., Baker, D., and Shrestha, L., Situation Awareness in Team Performance: Implications for Measurement and Training, Human Factors, 37(1), 123-136, 1995.


Salvador, T., Scholtz, J., and Larson, J., The Denver Model for Groupware Design, SIGCHI Bulletin, 28(1), 52-58, 1996.

Sarter, N., and Woods, D., How in the World Did We Ever Get into That Mode? Mode Error and Awareness in Supervisory Control, Human Factors, 37(1), 5-19, 1995.

Seely Brown, J., Collins, A., and Duguid, P., Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning, Educational Researcher(January-February), 32-42, 1989.

Segal, L., Effects of Checklist Interface on Non-Verbal Crew Communications, NASA Ames Research Center, Contractor Report 177639, 1994.

Segal, L., Designing Team Workstations: The Choreography of Teamwork, in Local Applications of the Ecological Approach to Human-Machine Systems, P. Hancock, J. Flach, J. Caird and K. Vicente ed., 392-415, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1995.

Short, J., Williams, E., and Christie, B., Communication Modes and Task Performance, in Readings in Groupware and Computer Supported Cooperative Work: Assisting Human-Human Collaboration, R. M. Baecker ed., 169-176, Morgan-Kaufmann Publishers, Mountain View, CA, 1976.

Smith, K., and Hancock, P., Situation Awareness is Adaptive, Externally Directed Consciousness, Human Factors, 37(1), 137-148, 1995.

Smith, R. The Kansas Project. http://www.sun.com/research/ics/kansas.html, 1999.

Smith, R., Hixon, R., and Horan, B. Supporting Flexible Roles in a Shared Space Proceedings of ACM CSCW'98 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work pp.197-206, 1998.

Sohlenkamp, M. and Chwelos, G., Integrating Communication, Cooperation and Awareness: The DIVA Virtual Office Environment, Proceedings of ACM CSCW'94 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 1994, p.331-343.

Stefik, M., Foster, G., Bobrow, D., Kahn, K., Lanning, S., and Suchman, L., Beyond the Chalkboard: Computer Support for Collaboration and Problem Solving in Meetings, Communications of the ACM, 30(1), 32-47, 1987a.

Stefik, M., Bobrow, D., Foster, G., Lanning, S., and Tatar, D., WYSIWIS Revised: Early Experiences with Multiuser Interfaces, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 5(2), 147-167, 1987b.

Tang, J., Listing, Drawing, and Gesturing in Design: A Study of the Use of Shared Workspaces by Design Teams, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1989.

Tang, J., Findings from Observational Studies of Collaborative Work, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34(2), 143-160, 1991.

Tatar, D., Foster, G., and Bobrow, D., Design for Conversation: Lessons from Cognoter, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34(2), 185-210, 1991.


Tang, J. C., and Minneman, S. L., VideoWhiteboard: Video shadows to support remote collaboration, Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New Orleans, 1991, 315-322.

Watts, J., Woods, D., Corban, J., Patterson, E., Kerr, R. and Hicks, L. Voice Loops as Cooperative Aids in Space Shuttle Mission Control. Proceedings of ACM CSCW'96 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 1996, 48-56.


Appendix A: Observational studies used in the framework

We observed several groups performing simple tasks in physical shared workspaces, in

order to gather basic information about the uses and mechanisms of workspace awareness,

and to gain first-hand experience with phenomena described in research literature. Findings

from these studies contribute to the structure and content of the conceptual framework. The

studies were informal and varied widely in task, group structure, setting, and realism; in

some cases, we even participated as part of the group. We did not consistently employ one

particular methodology, but in all cases we observed the collaboration and recorded our

observations. In some sessions, the collaboration was videotaped for later review.

Below, we introduce each session to give an idea of the settings and the tasks that were

observed. The first five tasks were completed in a laboratory setting, and the final two were

visits to real work environments. In the laboratory tasks, people were allowed to organize

their collaboration however they saw fit. All of the laboratory tasks were made-up

activities, while the two real work visits involved people’s normal work activities.

Blocks and puzzles. We began our observations by asking people to complete simple

tabletop tasks with one of us as a partner. Three people each completed three different

tasks. The first task was a jigsaw puzzle, the second was a puzzle with pentominoes pieces,

and in the third, we built a house out of toy blocks. All three tasks were carried out at an

ordinary table. These tasks took approximately 10 minutes each to complete.

String. Three dyads were asked to measure the distance between several pairs of points on a

whiteboard, using a long piece of string as a measuring tool. The points were far enough

apart that each person had to hold one end of the string. The participants did the task in two

settings: first, in front of a normal whiteboard, and second, with a divider that prevented

them from seeing one another’s work areas. The tasks took about 20 minutes in total.

Cathedral. Two pairs completed a more complicated construction task, that of building a

two-dimensional plan of a cathedral using a variety of cardboard pieces. The task included

constraints (such as keeping the colours symmetrical) to encourage more interaction

between the two participants. The task took place on a large table, and participants were


allowed to move where they wished around the workspace. The cathedral task took about

40 minutes to complete.

Concept map. Three pairs were asked to complete a half-finished concept map using a

written paragraph as their guide to the entities and relationships in the map. Again, the

materials were paper and pencils, and the workspace was a large table. Pairs had to

organize a set of existing objects and relations, and then add to the diagram until the

paragraph was fully represented by the map. The concept map tasks took people about 50

minutes to finish.

Newspaper layout. Nine pairs completed a newspaper layout task. Groups were asked to

put together a two-page spread of a fictional newspaper, using paper articles, pictures, and

headlines supplied to them. Groups were allowed to lay out the pages as they wished, as

long as the paper had a roughly consistent style. These tasks required about 40 minutes.

Results of this study were reported in (Gutwin, Roseman, and Greenberg 1996).

Newsroom. A visit to the student newspaper offices on production day was one of two

observations of real work situations. We spent approximately six hours in the production

room of the Gauntlet, the University of Calgary student newspaper, watching activities that

ranged from story composition to page layout. In the part of the office we observed, five

writers and two editors worked on the paper.

Air traffic control. The second real work situation that we visited was the air traffic control

centre at the Calgary airport. We spent about four hours observing three collaborating

controllers who supervise the airspace in a 35-mile radius around Calgary. A controller is in

charge of one of three stations: commercial arrivals, commercial departures, or small

private aircraft that operate under visual flight rules. Controllers sit in front of large radar

screens that show all flight activity within an adjustable radius from the airport. Therefore,

controllers see one another’s aircraft on their screens. The controllers interact with each

other, with the tower operators who supervise takeoffs and landings, and with regional

controllers who supervise the airspace beyond the 35-mile radius. A typical high-level task

for the arrivals controller, for example, would be to accept an aircraft from the regional

controllers, guide it into its final approach, and hand it off to the tower controllers (cf.


Heath and Luff 1992).

a descriptive framework of workspace awareness...

Documents